'Raggle Taggle' is an ebullient and poignant new community play
about British Romany Gypsies. Written for ten principal characters
and up to 60 others, it is a story of young love, a cry from the
heart against prejudice, and a wide ranging celebration of the
richness and diversity of Romany Gypsy culture.

Jeremy Sandford, author of 'Cathy Come Home' and 'Edna the Inebriate
Woman', has returned to a subject with which he’s had lifelong
involvement. As editor of 'Romano Drom', a Gypsy newspaper, and in
his work as an executive with the Gypsy Council, he has been an
unstinting and powerful advocate for their cause in Britain.

A Note from Jeremy Sandford

Rory O'Sullivan, Beaufort Community School's Head of Drama, drove
over to meet me at the Royal Oak Hotel in Leominster, close to where
I live. Over Guinness and a sandwich he told me that the Cheltenham
Festival of Literature would like to commission a play about
Britain's traditional Gypsy travellers, to be performed by the
school, its teachers, and other members of the community.

One of the school staff had read my book 'Gypsies', another had
heard a programme I did on the radio. The school had had Gypsy
pupils, Rory explained, although there are none there at the moment.
I was struck by the contrast with one of our local Herefordshire
schools whose Headmaster had illegally banned Gypsy pupils from his
school and for this act of prejudice been reported to the Commission
for Racial Equality.

I designed 'Raggle Taggle' to be panoramic in scope and swift moving
in its locations. There is a section, set in the sixteenth century,
when the mere fact of being a Gypsy could be and was punished by
death. But most of the play takes place in contemporary Britain and
moves between the home of the Lockett family, a suburban housing
estate, a large car dump, the Great Gypsy Horse Fair, shopping
precincts, a local authority Gypsy site, a country fête,
lay-bys and highways, and a shady hotel in Gloucester. There is also
a sequence celebrating some of the world Gypsy heritage in song,
dance, and circus skills. This is set in the bible lands, Pakistan,
Turkey, Romania, Africa and Spain.

Early on Rory and I agreed that the play must, above all, be about
our Gypsies as they are, rather than romantic notions of how they
should be, or might be, or sparkly-eyed tourist Gypsies dancing
Spanish flamenco, or any other of the romantic manifestations of
Romany in so many different countries. A place would be found for
these latter in the play as well, but its main ingredient was to be
life as lived by typical British Gypsies today; those who are
affluent enough to buy their own bit of land and keep out of the
public eye, and above all those others parked on the public lands -
the commons and lay-bys - the most immediately high profile part of
our Gypsy population.

With their old fashioned and non-literate culture, our Gypsies
played a major and largely unacknowledged part in preserving our folk
music. It was to them that people like Vaughan Williams went when it
became fashionable to write down our British folk heritage. And
traditional British folk music can still be heard round our Gypsies'
firesides. So we decided that our play should be a musical, or, at
the least, a 'play with songs'.

A particularly pleasant part of my job was to scour my music library
for Gypsy music to be used in the play; not only our own but also
from other parts of the world. I volunteered to play with the band
and so ensured that I would be able to play a small part in the
pleasurable task of helping Rory transform my text into reality.

I soon became aware that writing a community school play is more
like writing a feature film than writing an ordinary stage play.
This is because of the vastness of resources on which a community
school can draw. Rory responded most enthusiastically when I
mentioned that a cast of 60 or 80 could be exciting and appropriate.

Multi racial Britain now has many minority groups and they are, it
seems to me, a wonderful ingredient in our National Heritage, adding
a rich variety of possible lifestyles and art forms, especially for
those just approaching adulthood and wondering what sort of life
they'd like to have. Of no group can this be more truly said than
our 100,000 or so Gypsies. Arriving in England in the sixteenth
century (and in Scotland some time before that) they were our first
immigrants, although, of course, there had been many other racial
groups who came as invaders.

It is sad to report that the situation has altered to the
disadvantage of our British Gypsies since this play went into
production. The bad news is that the last government, in their
Criminal Justice Act, did their best to make the traditional right to
park by the roadside or on commons illegal.

3

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